7. Conceptual Colonialism: How Descriptions Carry Explanations

Craig Martin [+-]

St. Thomas Aquinas College

Craig Martin, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at St. Thomas Aquinas College. His work focuses on method and theory in the study of religion, as well as discourse analysis and ideology critique of modern rhetoric on religion. His recent works include Capitalizing Religion: Ideology and the Opiate of the Bourgeoisie and A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion.

Description

Here Craig Martin discusses the American documentary Outrage (2009) which suggests the Republican party has a large number of closeted homosexuals, who often vote against legislation that would support gay rights in order that they remain closeted. Here, Martin argues that the film represents a brand of “conceptual colonialism,” presented as the application of concepts onto foreign social contexts where those concepts are used in the service of the interests of those applying the concepts. Looking to Russell T. McCutcheon’s “It’s a Lie. There’s No Truth in It! It’s a Sin!”: The Cost of Saving Others from Themselves”, that critiques Robert Orsi’s Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (2006) on the grounds of positing a foreign explanation for something not so similar – Martin highlights (and suggests accountability for) the sleight-of-hand tactics so embedded within the arena of conspiratorial American political theater and domain of the academic study of religion among the American terrain.

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